Visualize a Tyrant King dinosaur with ribbed, skeletal wings, reduced to the dimensions of a kangaroo, and you'll have a fairly accurate mental picture of one. All they do is eat. Birds and small mammals, fruits, berries and nuts. In twenty-four hours a Draconian flying lizard can eat three times its weight in food. But a man is safe if he keeps his distance, for they are lazy by nature and don't attack without provocation. "They're taboo animals," I told her. "The natives call them 'Servants of the Mountain.' If your purpose was to infuriate the natives you couldn't have made a better start." She returned my stare with a strange mixture of alarm and defiance. "I had no way of knowing that!" she protested. "This planet is down on the charts as uninhabited. A virgin wilderness. If there are intelligent primitives here--" Her face grew suddenly strained. She stared about her as if seeking an answer for something intangible that was pressing in upon her thoughts and undermining her confidence in herself. I was feeling it too. A kind of cold unpleasantness with underpinnings of loneliness and dread. When you're thousands of light years from Earth you've got to hold tight to your anchorage in the past, your primal birthright of friendship and trust. There were a thousand ties linking me to Earth, and that distant jungle world was just a stopping off point to me in a web of heart-warming memories that sustained me night and day. No matter how lonely I became I could always tell myself that I'd soon be going back to the people and places I'd known all my life. I was far away, sure. But there would always be friends awaiting my return. Freeze that memory chain, shatter the brittle links, and the human mind has no refuge left anywhere in time or space. I had only to substitute Tragor for Earth to know how Kallatah must have felt. But before I could move to her side all of the links snapped, and we were caught up in a jungle new and terrible and strange, with all points of reference stripped away. I'd experienced that horror before and I knew exactly what to expect. It began with a dull flickering, a faint shifting of light and shadow at the edge of the clearing. Leaves swirled up from the forest floor, and a solid wall of vegetation began to sway, to tremble and twist about. As Kallatah cried out in alarm a tangled mass of bright, toadstool-like growths split up into dozens of spinning fragments, the air about them crackling and bursting into flame. With a sudden, roaring sound a tree collapsed, dislodging a screaming shrewlike beast that scampered into the clearing with its tail between its legs. There was a moment of awful silence while the jungle built up tensions past all sanity. The clearing became a trap brimming with a malevolence as unnerving as the ticking of some hidden detonating device.